


Stuck In Reverse

by yellowclock



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Angst, F/F, Sad and guilty Kara, evil Lena
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-20
Updated: 2017-06-20
Packaged: 2018-11-16 07:19:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,751
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11249001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yellowclock/pseuds/yellowclock
Summary: Lena did not react well to Kara keeping the Supergirl secret from her for so long.





	Stuck In Reverse

**Author's Note:**

> I was bored on a plane and wrote this. It makes no sense so I apologize.

Kara stood before the closed doors of Lena's office, nervously wringing her hands together and taking quick, shallow breaths, trying to slow her erratic heartbeat, trying to will away the stupid tears that were forming in her eyes, trying to stop her stomach from turning. She stood outside of Lena's office for over three minutes, trying to _just calm down_ and miserably failing to do so.

Failing to calm down due to the tire screeches, the sirens, the yelling, the crying, the joking, the laughter... National City's _noise_ which she could distantly hear over the loud buzzing in her ears.

She was failing to calm down due to the memory of her sister's concerned voice, hours earlier, telling her _you don't have to do this, Kara_.

She was failing to calm down due to the eyes that Kara felt on her, the eyes of the new secretary who'd never seen her before but recognized her name since it was the only one on the 'immediately show into office' list. She also knew her name because _the last assistant told me about you, he said he was sure you'd never come back — Please, forgive me, Miss, that was completely out of line_.

She was failing to calm down for many, many reasons but the biggest one was because of that strong, steady, _loud_ heartbeat that she could clearly hear through the doors.

It's the first time Kara heard it in _months_ and it was making everything more difficult than it should be.

When she walked out of Lena's office after their fight months ago, she promised herself not to listen in to her heartbeat anymore. She kept her promise.

(Except for a couple of times on those first few nights when she'd lay in bed, wide awake, with puffy red eyes and a pillow held so tightly to her chest anyone could've been fooled into thinking her life depended on it. On those nights Kara would let her super-hearing find Lena's heartbeat. She'd let herself fall asleep to the calming sound of it.)

So after months without it, it's shocking and sad to find that her heartbeat didn't have that effect on Kara anymore. 

It was the complete opposite, actually. 

Her heartbeat made her want to turn around, find the nearest window, jump and fly as fast as she could to the other side of the world.

Her heartbeat made her want to fake some unknown alien disease that coincidentally only Barry could cure on Earth-1.

Her heartbeat made her want to punch concrete and use her heat-vision until she solar-flared and scream until her throat felt raw and cry and cry and cry and fall to her knees before Lena and beg her to _please_ understand, to _please_ forgive her.

"Miss?" Lena's assistant spoke from her desk after watching Kara stand practically motionless in front of Lena's doors for almost 5 minutes, breaking the silence and making the blue sweater-clad blonde jump, "Should I tell her you're here now or do you need more time?"

Kara took a deep breath, an attempt to steel herself, "Tell her now," she said with fake confidence, "I'm ready," she muttered to herself, moving her hand to her face and adjusting her glasses before letting out a shaky breath.

"Miss Luthor, Kara Danvers is here to see you," the secretary said and Kara instantly heard a sharp intake of breath and a heart speeding up.

With wide eyes, the reporter realized that she was in fact _not_ ready at all to see the other woman yet. 

The noise from the city got impossibly louder along with the sound of her own heartbeat in her ears. Her breathing got even shallower than it was and she briefly wondered if Kryptonians could get panic attacks. When she heard Lena's _let her in_ she was pretty sure she was just about to find out.

Within seconds, though, the secretary had stood up from her desk and opened the doors of her boss' office, urging the blonde to walk in with a pointed look. After Kara stepped inside, the secretary closed the doors quickly, leaving Kara in Lena's office, staring intently at the wall opposite her, both her hands anxiously grabbing one another.

"Miss Danvers," Lena greeted coldly, not moving from her seat behind her desk, not standing up to hug Kara. Not a hint of affection in her voice.

The blonde closed her eyes tightly before forcing a polite smile onto her face and finally turning her head to look at the CEO for the first time.

Lena Luthor had her hair up in an elegant bun and wore a black -probably very expensive- blouse along with a dark, tight skirt. Her gorgeous, striking green eyes stared into Kara's own blue ones with clear disinterest and annoyance and boredom and _hate_.

Hate was never something she saw in Lena's eyes.

Not even when they first met, when she walked into her office with Clark Kent to ask her if she was the one responsible for the Venture blowing up, when they basically accused her of attempting to murder dozens of people for the mere reason of having Luthor for a lastname.

She just never looked at her like _this_.

Like she wanted nothing more than to kick her out of her office. Like she was disgusted Kara was in such close proximity to her. Like she couldn't believe she'd called someone like Kara her _best friend_ once.

It _hurt_.

The blonde felt heat in the back of her eyes signalling that tears were coming. She looked down at her feet and with a deep breath, she tried to get it together and brace herself for the conversation.

She was here for a reason, after all.

"We need to talk," Kara stated.

"I'm busy," the brunette replied, "ask Jen to give you my PR team's number. You can ask them whatever it is that Snapper told you to ask me. Now..." she picked up some papers that were laying on her desk and began reading them, "if you don't mind, I have to get back to work."

Kara simply stared, shocked and hurt at the clear dismissal from the other woman, standing still in the same spot where the secretary -Jen- had left her. 

After several moments, Lena noticed that Kara wasn't moving and with a loud sigh, the CEO put down the paper and looked at the blonde pointedly, "Anything else?"

The Kryptonian opened her mouth to speak but to both their disappointment, no words came out.

Kara quickly shook her head to clear her thoughts and decidedly walked to Lena's desk and, more confidently than she actually felt, sat in one of the seats across from the other woman, "Snapper didn't send me."

"Okay."

"I'm here talk about the..." she hesitated, Lena raised a perfectly shaped eyebrow, "about the anti-alien guns."

The brunette scoffed, "As I already told you, Ms. Danvers, you can talk to my PR team," she said calmly. Kara was about to reply when Lena spoke again, "also, please remind Jen to remove you from the list of people that have access to my office."

"Lena," Kara gasped brokenly, the harsh comment hurting her more than she expected.

Lena frowned, her eyes flashing with regret for a moment before growing impassive again, "Don't you have thieves to catch? Fires to put out? Friends to betray?" She stood up and walked to where she kept her liquor, pouring herself a glass of scotch and drinking it in one go before pouring another.

Kara moved her glasses to the top of her head to rub at her face in frustration.

Lena hated her.

Alex was right, she shouldn't have come, she should've let the DEO handle this, it was their job, not Supergirl's and now Lena made it clear that it was none of Kara Danvers' business either.

"What is it, Supergirl? Your surprise visit isn't going the way you planned?" Lena mocked, leaning against the side of her desk, looking down at Kara who still had her face in her hands.

With a small groan, the blonde uncovered her face and looked up at the CEO, "Just tell me why L-Corp is planning to sell anti-alien guns to civilians so we can both go back to work."

Lena hummed thoughtfully, "Did that secret organization of yours send you? Or maybe your cousin?" 

"What? No, Superman didn't - ugh. The DEO just - kind of? Yeah, I'm here because of the DEO, sort of." 

Lena scoffed, no longer finding the reporter's rambling cute, "And here I thought maybe you'd come because you wanted to see me," she joked dryly, taking a sip of her drink, "looks like I was wrong about you. Again." She let out a self-deprecating laugh, glancing at Kara's glasses perched on top of her head, "it's literally just a pair of glasses and a ponytail, how the fuck did I not see it?"

The Kryptonian cringed before quickly and clumsily putting her glasses back on her face.

"That wasn't necessary. You look great with the glasses off, too," she said offhandedly, "or is it that you're still trying to make me think Kara Danvers and Supergirl aren't the same person?" 

"Lena, please, just answer the question," the reporter spoke, successfully ignoring the passive-aggressive comment and avoiding the childish, inappropriate blush that almost tainted her cheeks in response to the compliment.

For some reason her body had always reacted very strongly to Lena's compliments.

"Well, Kara, some aliens are way more powerful than us humans and I believe that we should be able to protect ourselves in case one of them decided they were better than us and attacked us," she started, swirling the contents of her glass, "I recently had a bad experience with an alien myself," Lena tilted her head, "I trusted her with my life... But turns out she'd been lying to me for the entirety of our friendship, trying to get close to me, keep an eye on me," Lena finished her glass of scotch and placed it on the desk more roughly than she meant to, crossing her arms, "I wish I'd had a way to protect myself and I wish for everyone else to have one if they ended up being in a situation similar to mine," she shrugged, "That's why L-Corp is planning on distributing those guns. Anything else?"

Kara's mouth had fallen open sometime during Lena's rant, shocked out of her mind by what she was hearing, "You- that's- I can't-" the blonde stuttered, but gone were the nerves she had when she first entered the office, "you're unbelievable!"

"Am I now?"

Kara stood up, her temper getting the best of her, "I explained to you multiple times why I had to keep my identity a secret. I told you I didn't do it to keep an eye on you or anything like that. But you know what? I'm not gonna apologize for that anymore. I did that more than enough," she stepped closer to Lena, less than a foot apart between them, "I can't believe you. You're willing to have people kill innocent aliens just because I... because I broke your trust?" 

The reporter looked into the other woman's eyes, alternating between the two green orbs, hoping to find something, anything that showed that Lena wasn't being serious, that she hadn't really just turned into an anti-alien bigot in just a few months. When Kara didn't find what she was looking for, she stepped away from Lena with an angry huff, "Lena, we've all been lied to and betrayed at some point in our lives and that - that really isn't a good enough excuse to do this."

"To do what, Kara?" Lena spat, taking a step forward to get closer to the superhero again, defiantly looking straight into her eyes, "To want humans to be able to defend themselves?"

"Humans are safe, Lena! It's not aliens they have to worry about!"

"Really? How many alien attacks have there been in this city alone? How many human casualties?"

"Not too many, especially since I started being Supergirl."

"Oh, like when you threw Cat Grant off of her balcony and tried to murder cops for no reason?"

"What? That was- Lena, that wasn't my fault, that was red kryptonite. It altered my brain!"

"But it was you, Kara. How long until something like that happens again? Don't humans have the right to be prepared to protect themselves?"

Kara groaned and turned her back to the CEO, throwing up her arms and walking towards the couch, "It's never going to happen again and if it did the DEO would take care of it! Rao, you're starting to sound—"

"Oh, I'm starting to sound..." Lena interrupted, smiling humorlessly, closely following the blonde to the other side of her office, "like my brother? Like my mother? Like a _Luthor_?" She all but hissed and Kara quickly turned around to respond but fell silent when she found herself almost nose to nose with the other woman, green eyes blazing, her breath hot against her own lips, the back of her legs pressed against the couch.

"Well, Kara, you can't say I didn't warn you. I told you I was afraid of who I'd become if I lost someone else, didn't I?" The CEO raised an eyebrow and somehow stepped even closer to Kara, her warmth seeping into the reporter's clothes, chest to chest, lips _almost_ touching. And Kara had this sudden, unexpected, inappropriate _urge_ to close the gap between them. To taste her lips, to swallow whatever Lena was about to say, to grab her face and kiss her and show her that she was good, that she was going to be fine, that they were going to be fine, that this was all just a misunderstanding and that she was sorry and —

"I'd lost a lot of people, Kara," Lena reminded her, "but you told me you'd always be there for me and I believed you," she said quietly, her eyes almost looking the way they did before their friendship broke apart, when she looked at Kara like she meant the world to her. Lena placed her hands on Kara's biceps and slowly slid them up to her shoulders, her face still just inches away from the taller woman's.

"But then I lost you, too," she caressed the superhero's shoulders gently and Kara's breath hitched, her heart rate speeding up, her face heating up, "so I had to rethink my position and I... I realized some things," the brunette said, "some things that I didn't want to see before but that I accept and embrace now," Lena frowned to herself before roughly pushing Kara away, catching the Kryptonian off guard and making her fall gracelessly onto the couch. Aghast, Kara stared at Lena for a few moments before the woman turned around and spoke, all indifferent CEO coldness and steel again, "I have to work. See yourself out."

She walked back to her desk and sat, starting her laptop and staring at the screen. Kara, speechless, watched her from her new position on the couch, realizing that maybe her friends, the media, everyone, had been right about Lena all along. All the things they said after the anti-alien weaponry press release... Kara didn't want to believe them but they were right. 

Maybe Lena really had changed.

Her best friend had fallen and not only had she not been there to catch her, she had been the one to push her, push her to what she'd feared the most her entire life. She'd made her a _Luthor_ , the _bad_ kind, not the selfless and good she'd known when they were close. And it was all her fault. Lena trusted her wholeheartedly, telling Kara her hopes, dreams, worries and fears while the alien selfishly kept the most important fact about herself from her because it allowed things to be easy.

And now she's lost her. The first real friend she ever made for herself.

She felt tears forming in her eyes and subtly wiped them away while the CEO shifted her focus from the screen to Kara and said: "If you don't leave I'll call security," so the hero got up and left the office without a word.

Later that day, Kara promised herself to fix it. She didn't care how but she was going to get her friend back, no matter what or how long it would take, Kara would fix it.


End file.
